"Here is a story about Los Angeles: In 1935, a man who attempted to murder his wife gifted over 4,000 acres of land – previously owned by a man who had survived two attempts on his own life by separate, jilted lovers – to a corrupt mayor later driven from office by the efforts of a charitable Christian businessman with a side business in sexual novelties, who discovered that mayor’s secrets behind a false wall in a fake library. That businessman founded a thriving chain of restaurants built on the premise of giving away free food, one of which became the meeting place for a science fiction writer’s club, whose members included a man who conned a rocket scientist out of his life savings after first taking notes on how the scientist masturbated, and another man who convinced the city of Los Angeles to erect a three-story-tall fake Babylonian arch in the middle of Hollywood and then turn it into a shopping mall. This really happened, and I mention it here to remind you of the old saw about truth’s superlative relationship to fiction.

"Before I started taxidermy, I imagined that spending so much time with a dead thing—holding it, weighing it, turning it over in my hands—might make death more understandable, but it hasn’t. Still I keep digging into the body—through skin, fat, muscle, organ, bones—digging for the secret, but the secret isn’t there."

"The five-and-a-half minute long cartoon begins with a crash and a bolt of lightning, followed immediately by a pair of wide eyes that take up the entire screen. These eyes resolve themselves into those of an owl, sitting blinking on a bare branch in a dark, wind-swept graveyard, framed against an impossibly large full moon."

"For Christmas this year, my daughter wants Santa to bring her a magic wand that allows her to enter books and movies, interact with the characters, and change their outcomes . . . She also wants the wand to resurrect the dead, though she adds this bonus feature as something of an afterthought, like a stand mixer that also makes sausage."

"I am Jewish. I am Jewish when watching Woody Allen movies. I am Jewish at delis and bar mitzvahs and seders and synagogues. I am Jewish when talking to a good-looking Jewish man. But I am never Jewish at Christmas."

"The kitchen was a moldering closet piled high with unimaginable garbage . . . There was an unwrapped bar of soap in the bed sheets; a jagged pane of broken glass; there were three conical piles of salt on the rug."